Early in February 1944, the plotters resolved to move at the earliest possible moment, before the Allies had a chance to land, in order to confront them with the reality of a new Germany that had rid herself of Hitler and was ready for peace. Elaborate arrangements were made : General Beck was to become chief of state and Dr. Goerdeler, the former Lord Mayor of Leipzig, was to be appointed Chancellor. Von Hassell was to receive the Foreign Ministry; von Witzleben was to become commander in chief of the Wehrmacht, the Defense portfolio going to Hoepner, an officer who had incurred Hitler’s wrath and had been cashiered some time before. The indefatigable von Tresckow was to take charge of the police, while von Stauffen-berg was to remain in the background as the gray eminence of the rebellion.
An assassination was scheduled for February 11, but was cancelled when one of the intended victims, Heinrich Himmler, did not show up at the meeting with Hitler, at which a bomb was to explode. On March 9, arrangements were made to kill Hitler with a revolver shot during one of his situation conferences, but it proved impossible to smuggle the assassin into the meeting. On May 15, the opposition received a tremendous boost through the appearance in its very center of two of Germany’s outstanding soldiers, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and General von Stuelpnagel, commandant of occupied Paris.
Dulles was kept posted of every move. It is presumed that he advised Eisenhower and Donovan. Whether Roosevelt was told of the conspiracy in the specific terms known to Dulles cannot be ascertained. It did not make any difference one way or another. The President had refused to sanction active American participation in the plot.
Dulles was torn between elation and frustration, between a burning desire to intervene in the coup and his orders to stay aloof. There he was, with his fingers on the feverish pulse of the German opposition, fully in a position to supply all the outside aid the plotters needed so desperately, and thereby contribute decisively to the early termination of the war, making the invasion superfluous. Yet his hands were tied. He lacked the authority to provide any support, not even a single fuse for a bomb, nor even any moral support. He had to sit back like a man dying of thirst, separated by an abyss he could not bridge, several feet from a spring of crystal clear water.
When the invasion came, the plotters were stunned and suspended action for the rest of June, except for Rommel, who started a campaign of his own, trying to persuade Hitler to throw in the sponge. Then, on the night of July 1, the decision was reached to set the plan into motion without any further delay. As the written record of that decision itself put it, “After the landing of the Allies, irreparable catastrophe can be avoided only by cutting short the war and stopping further bloodshed through the immediate formation of a new government—chosen from the leading members of the resistance movement—so constituted as to be acceptable to the Allies as a bargaining partner. This presupposes the death of Hitler.”
Von Stauffenberg was appointed Hitler’s executioner. To assure access for him to Hitler’s inner sanctum, he was made chief of staff to General Erich Fromm, commander in chief of the so-called Ersatzheer, the new last-ditch army scraped up from the bottom of Germany’s manpower barrel. It was decided to carry out the act with a bomb consisting of two pounds of explosives to be detonated with a chemical-mechanical fuse of English make, set for thirty minutes delayed action. Stauffenberg was to carry that pancake bomb into Hitler’s conference room in his leather briefcase. The bomb did not need to be of great power, since the contained concussion in Hitler’s concrete map room would enormously increase its lethal effect.
On July 20, at 10:15 a.m., Stauffenberg flew into Rasen-burg, accompanied by First Lieutenant von Haeften, his aide, and Stieff. He proceeded calmly to the officers’ mess inside the Wolfsschanze where he had breakfast, waiting to be called to Gen. Buhle, with whom he had a business appointment. Then he accompanied Buhle to Field Marshal Keitel, at all times carrying his attaché case. At 12:20 p.m., he was ready for his fateful date with Hitler, but was shocked when he was told that the situation conference was to be held in the Tea House, a flimsy frame building, instead of the concrete bunker where it was usually held. The shift filled him with grave misgivings, but he decided to go through with the plan. Upon entering the Tea House, he appeared to lose his way, going into a sideroom instead of the conference room where Hitler was already waiting. He needed this moment of seclusion to activate the time-fuse.
When Stauffenberg entered the conference room—about thirty-seven and a half feet long by fifteen feet wide, with a huge table occupying its center—he found Hitler seated at the center near the entrance with his back turned to him. Keitel, seated at the Fuehrer’s left, introduced von Stauffenberg to Hitler as an envoy of Fromm’s. There was no seat reserved for Stauffenberg at the table, so he went to the far right corner where Brandt was seated, put the briefcase under the table and left, on the pretense of making a phone call to Berlin.
He was on his way out of Security Section A, riding with von Haeften to the airfield when he heard the explosion. He looked at his watch. It was exactly 12:50 p.m. He assumed that the Fuehrer had been killed. He arrived in Berlin, in the Defense Ministry on Bendler Street, in this firm belief, only to find the Ministry in an uproar. He was told that his bomb had failed to kill Hitler.
The rebellion was over before it could begin. A bloodbath of revenge followed, beginning with Stauffenberg’s summary execution in the courtyard of the Ministry. Beck was present in the Bendler Strasse, his first visit since his resignation in 1938, returning in short-lived triumph to act as Germany’s new chief of state for something like an hour. He alone was permitted the honor of committing suicide. Beck was nervous. He placed the gun at his temple, fired, but the bullet merely grazed his skin. Then he fired again and was mortally wounded, but somehow did not expire at once. Stauffenberg’s scandalized boss, Fromm, told an aide rather casually to end the man’s sufferings with a coup de grâce. This was the only act of mercy throughout the entire aftermath of the rebellion.
Eisenhower must have known that July 20 was the date set for the showdown in Germany, for Dulles had exact knowledge of the plot’s timetable and had advised Washington of it. The O.S.S. had submitted the information to SHAEF Forward at Portsmouth where Ike was spending his last few days in England prior to moving his headquarters to France.
July 20 was a Thursday. Eisenhower was going on a cross-Channel flight to visit Montgomery and Bradley in France, then returning to SHAEF Main at Widewing. According to Butcher’s diary entries, the General’s major concern during those days was split between Monty’s slow motion drive and the release of his dogs from quarantine. The plot was first mentioned in Butcher’s diary under date of July 22 and the entry included the cryptic remark: “I’m excited about it, but Ike isn’t.” Otherwise Butcher’s description of the event was full of inaccuracies, reflecting the widespread ignorance of these matters at Eisenhower’s headquarters. After lunch on July 22, Ike agreed to see the press for some background chit-chat about the attempt on Hitler’s life. The briefing consisted mainly of such platitudes as, “The coup against Hitler may have far-reaching effect, but just how cannot be guessed at the moment.” The event was not deigned worthy of specific mention in Eisenhower’s memoirs.
In Berne, Dulles was groping in the dark. Gisevius was back in Berlin. He had gone home in anticipation of the death of Hitler, hoping to carve for himself a niche in the new Reich. Gisevius survived the holocaust, as did a handful of the plotters, but hundreds, if not thousands, of patriots were destroyed. The bestial cruelty of the retribution could not be surpassed. It was not confined to savage gimmicks used in the executions to make the death agony of the victims as painful and prolonged as inhumanly possible. The torture was extended to the next of kin. The families were advised of the death of their loved ones in brief form letters that read, as in the case of General von Thuengen, one of the leaders of the rebellion:
“The former Lieutenant General Karl Baron von Thuengen was sentenced to death by the People’s Tribunal o
f the Greater-German Reich, on charges of treason and sedition. The sentence was carried out on October 24, 1944. The publication of an obituary notice is forbidden.”
Accompanying such letters was a bill. It contained the cost the family had to pay in marks and pfennigs for the last days of their loved one—300 marks for the death sentence, 1.84 mark for mailing charges, 81.60 marks for the cost of the defense, 44 marks for the cost of incarceration, 158.18 marks for the cost of the execution, and 12 pfennigs for the stamp on the envelope in which this macabre invoice reached the relatives.
The aftermath of July 20 was especially tragic in that it liquidated many of Germany’s best men and women, depriving the country of a group that could have made the major contribution to the rehabilitation of their land in the post-war world. From the viewpoint of the Allies, an enormous opportunity was wasted to conclude the war in Europe but forty-four days after the invasion—nine months and eighteen days ahead of what eventually became V-E Day. That such an outcome was distinctly possible—that major military moves can be terminated through the proper exploitation of conspiracies in the enemy’s camp—was proven by Dulles himself only a few month later when he had the authority to conduct an Intelligence operation on a historic scale, instead of being confined to the collection of information.
For the time being, though, Dulles was busy on Herren Street solely with the assembly of information and the collection of a network of spies and informants. Dulles was especially fortunate in having several spies in high echelons in the German diplomatic and intelligence hierarchy. They were, almost without exception, high-minded, highly-placed, unselfish German patriots, working without remuneration. The motive of these men was their anti-Nazi sentiment, but the Nazis called it treason and sedition. If it was treachery, the United States was not its sole beneficiary. As we have seen, the British refused to make any large-scale use of this source, but the Soviet Union made the most of these opportunities. Lucy (Rudolf Roessler) was working in Switzerland, too.
The quality of this espionage effort by Germans against the Third Reich was reflected in the caliber of the agents, the nature of the information, and the number of the documents supplied. Dulles once conceded that he had received the amazing total of two thousand and six hundred important documents from inside Germany, all of them photostats of originals. The number of documents Roessler received was also in the thousands.
Among these Germans were two men who had past associations with the United States and were emotionally committed to co-operation with this country. One was Otto Karl Kiep, a high-ranking career officer in the Foreign Ministry. He is still well remembered in New York, where he served as Consul General from 1930 to 1933. During the war years, when he represented the Foreign Office in the Abwehr, he became an important source of vital information. He managed to survive until January, 1944, when his clandestine group, the so-called Solf Circle, was penetrated by a Gestapo agent. Kiep was arrested, sentenced to death on July 1, 1944, and executed in Plötzensee prison on August 26.
The other was Adam von Trott zu Solz, a counselor of legation, member of a group of intellectual anti-Nazis called the Kreisau Circle. In the summer of 1939, Trott zu Solz established contact in Washington, D. C. with key Americans, and remained in touch with them throughout the war. Some of the most valuable intelligence Dulles received stemmed from Trott zu Solz. Deeply involved in the events of July 20, he was sentenced to death on August 15, 1944, and became a mere number in the “Mordregister”, as the Gestapo cynically called the roster of its victims—No. K-2063, dated August 26, 1944, the day of his execution.
Other diplomatists in this anti-Nazi group to which Dulles had access included Hans Berndt von Haeften, also a counselor-of-legation; Richard Kuenzer, a counselor-of-embassy; and Ambassador Friedrich Werner Count von der Schulenburg, who was the German envoy in Moscow at the time of the Stalin-Hitler pact in August, 1939.
Dulles never disclosed the specific sources of his intelligence, except to say that most of it had reached him through a mysterious go-between whom he identified only by his code name, George Wood. It is possible that Wood was a collective name for several informants.
Dulles managed to establish contact with an official in the Central Archives of the Berlin Foreign Ministry through whose hands passed the documents of the Ministry for filing. The usual procedure was to remove the documents after office hours and take them to Charité Hospital. The agent who arrived with the documents was actually wheeled into the operating room in the guise of a patient; the photographing was done in the operating room while apparently surgery was in progress. Then the originals were returned to the files before the office opened for business next morning, while the copies, on 35-mm Leica films, were smuggled to Dulles.
The value of the information he thus received was incalculable. At the time, German diplomats in neutral countries were sometimes secret agents, and the Foreign Ministry received intelligence from them that was not always confined to strictly diplomatic matters. Once the German Legation in Dublin radioed intelligence to Berlin about an Allied convoy that an agent had spotted assembling in New York. A copy of this signal wound up in Dulles’ hands. The information that the convoy had been spotted was cabled to Washington, and the convoy was safely rerouted.
At one period during the war, an obscure Albanian who served as the valet of the British Ambassador to Turkey hit upon a lucrative sideline when he managed to pry open the little safe in his employer’s bedroom where His Excellency kept his most highly classified papers. He delivered the loot to a Nazi agent at Ankara in exchange for a huge sum paid him in English pound notes. They turned out to be counterfeit, manufactured at a concentration camp by skilled inmates. The Germans came into possession of fantastic intelligence, including the alleged protocol of the Teheran Conference attended by Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin. The leak was plugged when Dulles found out about it from his agents in the Foreign Ministry in Berlin. The British did not seem to be highly pleased when Dulles tipped them off to the indiscretion of one of their top-ranking ambassadors. From their conspicuous lack of gratitude, it was deduced that maybe the leak was deliberate and that Dulles had plugged a hole that his colleagues at British Intelligence were eager to keep open.
Melodrama was also frequent on Herren Street, partly because of the nature of the mission, partly because of Dulles’ own innate fondness for the dramatic. A tall, tweedy, relaxed, professorial-looking, gregarious man, forever puffing on his pipe and laughing boisterously at even the hoariest joke, Dulles was more like a gifted amateur, an espionage buff, than the traditional spymaster. His quarters were in an apartment in a Fifteenth Century gray building, with a clanking front door leading into a medieval courtyard on the River Aar. The printed calling card on the apartment door identified its occupant as Allen W. Dulles, adding, “Special Assistant to the United States Minister.”
Dulles preferred to conduct most of his business late at night when he was at his scintillating best and most relaxed, and when his visitors could come to him under the cover of darkness. Every night at midnight he called Washington on the trans-Atlantic telephone, conducting lengthy conversations in an ingenious oral code. This arrangement was not without its pitfalls and setbacks. At one time, the maid of the house turned out to be a German agent. At another time, the use of a compromised code led to a tragic mishap. Count Galeazzo Ciano, former Foreign Minister of Fascist Italy, was in touch with the Allies and this rapprochement was reported from Herren Street to Washington in an encoded cable. The code had been broken by a brilliant group of Hungarian cryptoanalysts, and the decoded cable was forwarded to Mussolini in Northern Italy, resulting in Ciano’s execution.
Most of the time, Dulles handled in person only the most urgent and delicate matters. The actual management of the operation was in the hands of his aides, among whom probably most important was a young American of German origin, Gero von S. Gaevernitz, the son of Dr. Gerhart von Schultze-Gaevernitz, a prominent liberal politician in the Weimar Re
public. Young Gero immigrated to the United States when the Nazis came into power and got himself a job in Wall Street. He had kept up a line to Germany where he had many friends, including several serving in the Foreign Ministry. Others in the Dulles menage included a brilliant young German-Jewish journalist, the nephew of Vicki Baum, author of Grand Hotel. Several Dulles aides were refugees from Nazi persecution, living precariously in Switzerland, whose immigration laws are exceptionally stringent. Since they could not very well concede that they were working for Dulles, but had no other visible means of income, the Swiss kept threatening them with deportation as undesirable aliens. The problem was solved by making arrangements with a “psychiatric retreat” near Berne. The refugees were “committed” for the duration, and were thus removed from the scrutiny of the Swiss police, but could come and go as they pleased—a bunch of “lunatics” very much at large.
In addition to its invaluable routine work, this team accomplished one exploit that established it as one of the outstanding organizations in all the history of espionage. It began in January, 1945—at a time when two U.S. armies were pushing the Germans out of the Ardennes bulge and an Allied offensive penetrated into the Siegfried Line. In Italy, a huge German army slowed the Allied advance there almost to a standstill. In Northern Italy, Mussolini still held sway over a vindictive Fascist Republic, harassed by intrepid partisans but protected and supervised by twenty-one German divisions.
The German military command was held by Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, one of Goering’s closest intimates. The political command was in the hands of Dr. Rudolf Rahn, Hitler’s personal envoy to Mussolini. Somewhere between the two was a tall, blond, hook-nosed, elegant ex-advertising man from Berlin, Karl Wolff by name, a general of the fighting SS. A former aide of Heinrich Himmler, he was delegated to watch over Kesselring and Rahn. For all practical purposes, the blond Nazi was the most important German in Northern Italy, living in a marble palace at Fasano on Lake Garda amidst substantial pomp.
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